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The pride and fall of warrior comet Lovejoy

IN DECEMBER 2011, a comet called Lovejoy ploughed into the sun’s corona – and to everyone’s surprise, emerged on the other side. But it turned out that Lovejoy couldn’t take the heat for long.

Zdenek Sekanina and Paul Chodas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, reanalysed pictures taken on 20 December, showing that Lovejoy’s nucleus, the cometary equivalent of a head, had suddenly vanished.

Based on the structure and composition of other comets, they concluded that the dusty core disintegrated about two days after its trip through the corona. They put it down to a build-up of thermal stress that continued to destroy it from within (The Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/jck).